Books of the times; An Actress Tries Reconciling the Many Lives She's Lived

By JANET MASLIN

Published: April 5, 2005

Jane Fonda's first husband, Roger Vadim, lured her into ''Barbarella'' and made her feel like ''a female impersonator.'' Her second, Tom Hayden, announced after nearly 16 years of marriage that he was in love with another woman. Ms. Fonda responded by throwing his belongings out the window in garbage bags. ''That helped a little,'' she says.

Her third, Ted Turner, married her on her 54th birthday. He was cheating on her a month later, prompting Ms. Fonda to hit him repeatedly with a car phone (which, she reflected as an actress, might be an interesting gesture to see in a movie).

And when Ms. Fonda decided to make a short autobiographical video to celebrate her 60th birthday, her daughter Vanessa, a documentary filmmaker, remarked with succinct cruelty, ''Why don't you just get a chameleon and let it crawl across the screen?''

But in her sisterly, enveloping memoir, ''My Life So Far,'' this chameleon appears in yet another incarnation: soap opera queen. Thanks to a spectacularly unhappy childhood, she writes, and the guilt over preferring her icy father to her suicidal mother, she has been desperately insecure and relentlessly driven. Schadenfreude-loving fans of celebrity autobiography can delight in such confessions as, ''In truth I thought of myself as fat and boring, and I was scared to death of failure.''

But ''My Life So Far'' makes it clear that failure was seldom a real prospect. Its author has been so emblematically successful, strong and polarizing that her self-doubt hasn't often been apparent. Finally it is, despite this book's occasional efforts at rousing jargon about the potential bliss to be found in a Third Act, as Ms. Fonda calls it. Only now that she is linked to sex via the word sexagenarian (she is 67) can she address the fundamental Daddy-craving emptiness that kept her in frenetic motion.

Scales fall from her eyes in ways that illuminate ''My Life So Far,'' an intimate, haunting book that might as well be catnip from its ever controversial author. There is the sense that Ms. Fonda is being as honest as she knows how, which is to say selectively. (Unpleasantness like ''Letter to Jane,'' the semiotic diatribe addressed to her by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, goes unmentioned, beyond her use of the words ''dreaded'' and ''incomprehensible'' to describe ''Tout Va Bien,'' the Godard film in which she appeared.)

And as is evident throughout ''My Life So Far'' but most conspicuous in backpedaling about her 1972 visit to Hanoi, Ms. Fonda spins some revisionist attitudes out of her recent and overarching self-knowledge. Yes, she will forever regret being photographed straddling a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun. (''I simply wasn't thinking about what I was doing, only about what I was feeling.'') And yes, ''I hate buck passers,'' she writes. But she has conveniently shape-shifted to fit each new mini-lifetime. And that pattern makes it hard to reconcile old delusions with new convictions.

This much is unwavering: ''I was the only person I could treat badly and consider that morally defensible.'' Chalk up some of that attitude to the Fonda family history, which has been much rehashed elsewhere but comes chillingly alive in these pages. ''They were cold, shut-you-down, hard-to-come-back-from Protestant rages,'' she writes about the dark moods of her father, Henry Fonda. ''Except for Peter, who didn't seem to pay attention'' -- note her handy way of sideswiping her brother -- ''we all took great care to avoid his tripwire.''

Remembering that at least two of her father's five wives had eating disorders and that he would exclaim, ''You disgust me,'' to the ones who cried, Ms. Fonda describes turning bulimic and needy in adolescence. She also learned to overcompensate in vigorous, relentless ways that have made her unforgettable. Typically, upon the birth of her first child, Ms. Fonda made up for a childhood without lullabies by getting a record and learning them. Just as typically, she mixes gentle paeans to motherhood with concern about ''not countenancing the personhood of my baby.''

Ms. Fonda -- who, with any luck, will be the last person to describe sense-memory exercises with Lee Strasberg -- writes that she fell into acting almost by accident. In retrospect, it seems even luckier that she never attacked her work with characteristic earnestness. Had she brought more of an autodidact's discipline to the creative process, she could never have been such an electrifying, utterly fearless performer. (Scared, she says, is ''the most difficult emotion for me to play.'')

Always busy elsewhere -- with men, causes, speeches (''all the time, everywhere, on and on and on in a frantic voice tinged with the Ivy League'') and the hugely popular exercise videos that now make young people associate her with their moms -- she brought entourages and sidelines to movie sets. One of this book's most memorable vignettes describes the making of ''On Golden Pond'' and Katharine Hepburn's anger at seeing an actress surrounded by so many distractions, especially an actress fierce enough to qualify as Hepburn's competition.

The story told by ''My Life So Far'' has a lot of ground to cover. It describes an ardent enthusiast rather than a dilettante, but its voice varies greatly. Sometimes Ms. Fonda is her own armchair psychologist; sometimes she is an idealist with an agenda; sometimes she is a woman embarrassed by girlish self-effacement around men.

And sometimes she is the way the world most often saw her: gorgeous, daring, tough as nails. When Mr. Hayden (who commented ''Nice try'' after watching her in the sexually frank ''Coming Home'') expressed scorn for her workout juggernaut, she ''would just think, O.K., I'm vain, call it what you will, but it sure makes a lot of women feel better.'' Besides, the exercise business raised millions of dollars for the grass-roots group Campaign for Economic Democracy, on which she and Mr. Hayden worked together.

Speaking of millions, ''My Life So Far'' addresses the greatest remaining question of Ms. Fonda's life: Ted Turner? How did a woman with her political convictions marry a onetime Goldwater Republican who practiced ''conservation by exclusion'' (i.e. buying up all the land in sight)? This book's delicate balancing act takes it from the most privileged form of fly-fishing (every time she got the hang of this at one Turner ranch, he would ''buy a new ranch with harder-, faster-flowing water and smarter, bigger fish'') to the plight of $1-a-day garbage-pickers and back again. It describes a man with his own truckload of contradictions who used ''I have friends who are Communists'' as a line to charm Ms. Fonda on their first date.

''Ted is the only person I know who has had to apologize more than I have,'' she writes. To read Ms. Fonda's account of her life as paradoxical, protean Weathervane Jane is to understand why.